Re: tar.xz packages?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 08:11:20PM -0600, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
>On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 03:37 +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> I'm not quite sure, but isn't it right that setup is capable of handling
>> xz compressed tar files in the meantime?
>
>> If we decide this is desirable, do we just convert the entire
>> release?  It would make things slightly easier for upset if it didn't
>> have to know about multiple formats.
>
>But upset should already support both gz and bz2, so multiple formats
>are already supported; would adding xz be that much work?

  slight·ly
  Adverb:	
      To a small degree; inconsiderably.

I would rather strip gz support in upset (and maybe even setup.exe) and
just standardize everything on .xz rather than complicate upset.

>> Yes, I know.  The mirrors! The mirrors! They will have to download the
>> equivalent of 1.5 times a full release!
>
>An alternative would be to repack only the binary tarballs, not the
>source ones.  The -src tarballs are generally barely compressed anyway
>(since the bulk of the contents is a compressed tarball which doesn't
>gain anything by recompression), so the few bytes we'd save by switching
>them from bz2 to xz certainly aren't worth the bandwidth it would cost
>to update the mirrors.

As I said above, as far as the mirrors are concerned, it's a one time
cost - less than a couple of users doing full installs.  As far as
sourceware is concerned, I'm willing to take the hit.

I don't like keeping things arbitrarily split between .bz2 and .xz.  It
seems like a pointless distinction which will be sure to cause questions
from users.

>> Another possibility is not to use .xz as an extension but decide to use
>> some other extension (.cyg).  Then the format could change while the name
>> stays the same.
>
>Please don't, as that would make it a lot harder to unpack/view package
>tarballs manually (e.g. neither File Roller nor Ark handled such a
>renamed tarball correctly when I tried).

There is no reason for me to care about File Roller or Ark but I was
discussing this with someone earlier today who mentioned that if we
decided at some magical point in the future to move to rpms we really
would want them to be called ".rpm".  That was, IMO, a good point so
I withdraw the vague suggestion.

cgf